Late Shift Portrays the Heroism and Exhaustion of Nurses on a Gruelling Night Shift in Switzerland

29 July 2025

Leonie Benesch in Late Shift. Photograph: Salvatore Vinci

In Late Shift, Swiss director Petra Volpe crafts a gripping portrait of dedication and strain as she follows Floria, a single mother and night-shift nurse navigating the relentless demands of an understaffed hospital. Floria, portrayed with grounded intensity by Leonie Benesch, enters her shift full of warmth and resolve fully aware that even a single absence among staff can send the unit spiralling into crisis.

The evening becomes a pressure cooker as another nurse calls in sick and the workload doubles, forcing Floria to stretch her resources physical, mental and emotional to the limit. The film’s near-real-time pacing and “walk-and-talk” style capture the chaos, camaraderie and compassion characteristic of real hospital life while keeping viewers rooted in Floria’s world.

Volpe adapts the story from Madeline Calvelage’s novel Our Profession Is Not the Problem It’s the Circumstances, inspired by her roommate’s nursing career. The result is intense and immersive. Volpe chose the German title Heldin meaning heroine to invoke the unlikely valor of caregiving. Her vision translated onscreen, as Floria’s experience embodies both acute professional acuity and emotional depth. Every page of this film is grounded in systemic failure rather than individual inadequacy. It casts a spotlight on the emotional labour, burnout and understaffing plaguing healthcare systems across Europe and beyond.

Benesch, known for roles in The Crown and The Teachers’ Lounge, delivers one of her most arresting performances yet. She trained alongside real Swiss nurses, shadowing their duties and routines to replicate the choreography of hospital corridors, from prepping syringes to charting vitals. Her portrayal is precise yet empathetic, bringing truth to the exhaustion and quiet heroism of nursing. Floria calms a dementia patient with a lullaby a fleeting moment of human connection suspended amid the relentless pace of the shift. The film captures both the technical complexity of healthcare work and its emotional fragility.

The film debuted to strong acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival, drawing applause from real nurses invited to the premiere who held #wirsindfloria signage in solidarity. Healthcare professionals from Germany’s nursing community praised the film’s authenticity, citing scenes that mirrored the familiar “vicious cycle” of understaffing: overwhelmed nurses calling out sick, leaving colleagues stretched even thinner. One audience member described it as “incredibly moving” and unmistakably real.

Despite its documentary realism the film leans toward formulaic drama at times. Conflicts get resolved too neatly, and some emotional montages slip into television tropes. A private patient’s complaint about delayed tea comes off as contrived one of several storylines wrapped up too quickly. Yet, Volpe balances these moments with sincerity, never losing sight of the film’s central calling: to humanize an overlooked profession.

Late Shift is also a rallying cry for broader policy attention. Over its ending credits the film presents World Health Organization data on the global nursing shortage, warning that as many as 13 million nurses may be missing by the end of the decade. Volpe hopes the film acts as both tribute and wake-up call arguing that empathy, investment and cultural recognition are urgently needed to support care workers who remain undervalued and overburdened.

The choice to set the film in Switzerland, with its relatively well-resourced healthcare system, serves as an indictment of deeper global failures. If the pressure is so intense here, what does that say about countries with larger systemic inequities? Late Shift asks viewers to reconsider where heroism truly lies not in heroic patients, doctors or rescue efforts, but in the nurses who hold suffering, deliver compassion and keep systems afloat with little recognition.

For audiences new to European arthouse cinema the film delivers fast-moving urgency without sacrificing character depth. Its pacing evokes a medical thriller, but it is emotional intelligence not jump scares that carries each scene. Floria’s mission is to care at all costs, even when the costs threaten her own exhaustion and grief. She is never depicted as exceptional only as someone doing her job under impossible conditions.

With release scheduled in the UK and Ireland in early August the film is already shaping up to spark conversations among healthcare professionals, policymakers and cinema lovers alike. Nurses owe its existence praise for its realism. Health administrators owe it scrutiny for the conditions it portrays. And viewers owe it attention not for spectacle but for solidarity. This is not a story about accidents it is a story about decisions. About choosing staffing levels, about valuing care work, about hearing the signals long before systems collapse.

In Late Shift Floria does not save her hospital. She survives it. And in doing so she reminds the rest of us that survival is its own kind of heroism.